You’re about to launch your app in the app store, you’re pumped about all the work you’ve put in to create a great experience.

Your app is using the latest design trends and follows all modern-day best practices. It should get a lot of downloads, right?

…

You wish!

App Store’s are getting more and more competitive. Visibility is going down — fast. The only way to stay competitive is to invest in keeping your app store listing always optimized & relevant.

In this blog post, I’ll give you 5 top-notch services that’ll help you optimize your app and increase your ranking on the App Store & Play Store.

As a bonus – you’ll also get 14 bonus tips for how to get the most of your app store listing.

SensorTower – track your keywords & app store health

Sensor Tower is a tool that lets app developers easily track and manage different keywords in the iOS AppStore.
Sensor Tower is divided into two parts: a free section that provides basic keyword tools and different rankings; and a paid section that includes much more powerful keyword tools.

The paid section is free to try with one app and a limited number of keywords to track, but be ready for the popups asking you to share for more usage.

Something to note here: Sensor Tower tracks reviews and ratings separately. There are 7 reviews from the past 90 days but the bar graph doesn’t show this. It maybe the reviews are too recent or there isn’t enough data but I find it annoying how it doesn’t show up.

AppSoar – get better reviews

AppSoar is a newcomer to the app-marketing marketplace, it’s a service that’s gotten a reputation as a dealer of high quality app reviews. You can contact them and order positive app reviews that’ll help you rank better in the app store.

Pricing starts at $15 per high quality review.

AppAnnie – track your app rankings & analytics

App Annie is a popular app ranking, analytics and market intelligence platform aimed at apps across marketplaces. Amongst the free and premium intelligence and analytics services provided, App Annie offers Apple & Google Play stats for apps and books and the App Annie Index, which provides global marketing insights into app store.

mobileDevHQ – your marketing dashboard

Appnique – improve your advertisement ROI

Appnique helps you find your best users and maximize the value of your adspend through intelligent audience targeting.

App Store Optimization Tips

1. Create an app video. Many people are visual. They want to understand the look and feel of your app before downloading it. Developing a quick trailer can move the sales process along. Be sure and showcase the usability and key features users will get when they download.
2. Create a demo. If your app is not free this is a key step. People want to play with your app before paying a fee to purchase. Create this experience through a demo, which will ultimately increase downloads — and rankings.

3. Avoid using words in your app icon – that’s what your app title and description are for.

4. Make sure your icon’s design is consistent to the design of your app.

5. Try adding borders to your icon so it looks great on all backgrounds.

6. When choosing keywords for your app, make sure to use all 100 characters – the more keywords you can rank for, the better.

7. Keep your app name consistent; keywords can be changed & optimized at any time

8. Use numbers instead of spelled out words.

9. Use words in their singular form, rather than plural, to save characters.

10. The first 5 lines of your app description are the most important. These lines are the only ones directly visible for people visiting your app page from their iPhone, iPad, or a desktop computer (without clicking “more”) and are as far as most potential users read

11. Ask for Ratings and Feedback – High ratings and positive feedback are one of the primary things potential users look at when considering downloading your app. Therefore, it makes that you want to encourage users to rate your app and leave positive feedback as much as possible. Apps with tops ratings scores are the ones that dominate the highest downloads category. So look for ways to keep customers engaged and encourage leaving feedback such as with small in-app perks and other smart rating prompts.

12. Re-Optimize Quarterly – Rather than monitoring the success of things like your keywords, images, name, etc on a weekly or monthly schedule, plan on regularly quarterly reviews of your product and aim to re-optimize then. Ideally if you are providing regular updates to your product that would also be a good optimization schedule to follow. For example, if 4 months after the initial launch you are going to release and update, perform your re-optimize to coincide with it. Overall this type of timing ensures that your keywords, reviews, and other aspects have adequate time to sink in before you look to overhaul things.

13. Optimize Your Desktop Website To Rank For App-Related Keywords.

14. Include a call to action to download your app on your website.

About the author

Dimitry Apollonsky

I'm a growth marketing pro that works with early stage companies to help them gain traction and reach their milestones through user acquisition, user retention and revenue growth.